About

Using empirical research to make the U.S. justice system work better for everyone.

The Problem The portion of the U.S. justice system that deals with people is in permanent crisis. 80% of family cases have a lawyerless litigant. Average caseloads can require state public defenders to initiate, investigate, bargain or try, and/or appeal two cases per day. For individuals and families without lawyers, courts are complex, full of jargon, hard to navigate, and scary. The good news is that there are already many proposed solutions to these challenges. The problem is that we don’t know which of those solutions make a difference.

What We Believe Providing decision makers in law with credible evidence about what works—the kind of information that comes from randomized control trials and rigorous qualitative evidence—will allow them to implement solutions that will provide better access to justice for individuals and families. When we say law needs to become evidence-based, we mean that law needs to use lessons learned from randomized (not observational) evaluations and strong qualitative investigation. These techniques will give decision makers confidence that the interventions they deploy will create the impacts that they want.

What We DoThe Access to Justice (A2J) Lab advances the required transformation by fielding randomized experiments to find what works and then generalizing results into actionable lessons. The Lab creates knowledge, constructs best practices, and trains current and future scholars and practitioners to transform the U.S. justice system.

The Lab has a four-pronged approach to transforming law into a profession founded in empirical research. The core pillars of our method are:

Randomized control trials (RCTs)We work with a variety of partners, including academic researchers, legal service providers, and courts, to design randomized control trials to test access to justice programs in areas of civil and criminal law.

Pro Se Self-Help Materials Because so many access to justice issues coalesce around pro se representation, we also design our own self-help materials to test in the field. Informed by a variety of disciplines that test their methods, we test our materials to make sure they really work.

IMPLEMENTING randomized control trials to find out what works for individuals and families in civil and criminal law.

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Building Coalitions Each study is a joint effort between courts, legal service providers, and researchers. The Lab works with everyone to create studies that work for everyone.

No Shortcuts RCTs have a long life cycle. To produce rigorous data, RCTs can take several years to develop and several more to field. The Lab’s commitment to rigorous evaluation and empirical data means that we never take short cuts. We never implement an intervention without a test.

SHARING lessons learned and best practices to transform the system.

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Publications and Conferences We publish as often as possible to maximize the impact of our work. We make all of our publications and, as much as legally possible, all of our data publicly available. To assure that our methods and data reach the lawyers and judges who can transform the U.S. legal profession, we speak at major conferences and hold our own events.

Research Affiliates We can’t do it alone. The A2J Lab works to build relationships with other distinguished scholars and mentor young researchers in order to increase the amount of rigorous evidence in law.

TRAINING current and future practitioners, scholars, and judges in methods and results to increase capacity and support for rigorous empirical research.

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Research Methods Short Course Most legal professionals don’t have experience with randomized evaluations or integrating credible evidence about what works. Most researchers don’t have experience working with legal professionals. We bridge this gap through our specialized short course to share best practices with both sides of the divide and through events and meetings that bring researchers and professionals together to launch more studies in the field than we could complete alone.

The Next GenerationThere are no quick fixes to changing how professionals think. Our best hope for transformational change is equipping the next generation of leaders in the field with the belief in research and the skills to implement credible data in their work. The Lab works with teams of student researchers at Harvard Law School and beyond to seed shoots of knowledge in students poised transform the system.